Metaphone is a
phonetic algorithm, an algorithm for indexing words by their sound, when pronounced in English.Metaphone was developed by
Lawrence Philips as a response to deficiencies in the
Soundex algorithm. It is more accurate than Soundex because it "understands" the basic rules of English pronunciation. Metaphone is available as a built-in operator in a number of systems, including later versions of
PHP.
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<
algorithm,
text> An
algorithm for encoding a word so that similar sounding words encode the same. It's similar to
soundex in purpose, but as it knows the basic rules of English pronunciation it's more accurate. The higher accuracy doesn't come free, though, metaphone requires more computational power as well as more storage capacity, but neither of these requirements are usually prohibitive. It is in the public domain so it can be freely implemented.
Metaphone was developed by Lawrence Philips
lphilips@verity.com. It is described in ["Practical Algorithms for Programmers", Binstock & Rex, Addison Wesley, 1995].
(1998-12-22)
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